Modern cameras and other image capturing devices offer a wide variety of capabilities, such as automatic exposure, color balancing, and open eye detection. These capabilities depend on the camera's ability to determine where the regions of interest are in the scene, such as the location and size of the faces.
To determine the location and size of these objects, cameras typically include a dedicated memory that is large enough to store an entire frame of the scene. This dedicated memory is often referred to as a “framestore” and can be undesirably large and area-consuming. Once an entire frame is stored in the framestore, a high-power processor repeatedly fetches and analyzes data from the framestore to identify the faces (or other objects) of interest. This process of identifying objects may take up a large proportion of the processing time and power in a camera.